Reviews/Film; Giving the 'Spinal Tap' Treatment to Rap

By JANET MASLIN

Published: June 3, 1994

Flattering the daylights out of Rob Reiner and his "Spinal Tap" crew, Rusty Cundieff turns "Fear of a Black Hat" into an unapologetic "Spinal Tap" imitation. And there's no point in faulting Mr. Cundieff for such derivativeness, because "Fear of a Black Hat" is too savvy and cheerful to warrant complaints. Anyway, the more the merrier: what "Spinal Tap" did for heavy metal certainly deserves to be done for rap, which is the target this time. If Mr. Cundieff doesn't match the satirical genius of Mr. Reiner's film, he does understand the rules of the game.

For instance, the band being studied in mock-documentary format must be publicly overconfident and privately pretty badly confused. Accompanying the group should be at least one unctuous flunky. "I really enjoy your work, fellas," one white manager says to some of this film's tough-guy black rappers. "Rich emotional tapestry."

White managers are deemed essential by the members of Niggaz With Hats, since the managers tend to get caught in crossfire and suffer other music-related mishaps. They drop like flies, just as Spinal Tap's drummers did.

Niggaz With Hats consists of Tasty-Taste (Larry B. Scott), Tone Def (Mark Christopher Lawrence) and Ice Cold (Mr. Cundieff). This group, like Spinal Tap, loves to explain the deeper meaning of its music when shutting up would be a better idea. Mr. Cundieff, who wrote and directed this film and is its funniest performer, earnestly explains why the group's name and extremely silly outfits are a subtle comment on slavery, for instance. Likewise, he can explain why the group's "Kill Whitey" album was unfairly tarred as racist, and point out that N.W.H.'s most sexist-sounding lyrics are actually political commentary.

Not surprisingly, this group is having career problems. For instance, the three rappers turn up for a concert and find themselves billed as "And Special Guest" on a marquee. Beyond stringing together episodes like this, "Fear of a Black Hat" doesn't have any more plot than "Spinal Tap" did, but it does trace the familiar show-biz misadventures. So Ice Cold complains bitterly about imitators (the film's other Ices include Tray, Coffee, Water, Berg and Box). And the group switches from a white-run record company to one whose owner so shamelessly flatters N.W.H. that he brings up Marcus Garvey, Bob Marley and Malcolm X in the process.

None of this helps, especially not Ice's efforts to start an acting career. In one of this film's faster, wittier sketches, Ice appears in a violent exploitation film and pauses to lecture an inner-city child about the evils of drug-dealing. The child is young enough to be in a baby carriage, but in a movie like this, he already has a beeper. Incidentally, the rappers' own stage costumes feature beepers as well as crazy hats, which owe a lot to Dr. Seuss. Tasty-Taste, the gun-crazy member of N.W.H. and the one most prone to ostentation, turns up at one concert with a full-size gold trophy hanging around his neck from a gold chain.

This film's musical parodies have titles and lyrics that are mostly unprintable, often borrowing directly from specific rap hits. You don't need to know the original to get the gist or to realize that these sendups are mildly amusing rather than really devastating. After "Spinal Tap," it became impossible to watch any heavy metal band with a straight face. While "Fear of a Black Hat" does blow the lid off certain stereotypes -- one of its toughest-looking rappers is exposed as a prep-school graduate who was once nicknamed Chip -- it's not as subversive. Nor is it as "def chill fresh," as one of the film's more hopeless, rap-loving characters likes to say.